Google is used to such indifference, as many wrote off their search engine for far too long. From their perspective, however, I suspect that things appear to be going quite well.

For example, they have the internet’s largest video website site, the web’s largest “video” search engine, and, were it a search engine of it’s own, it would be the web’s second biggest, behind their own main index in first place, as Youtube’s search volume by itself it still larger than all of Yahoo’s!

So, in true Google style they’ve pursued growth over early monetisation leading detractors to argue to that they’re struggling to monetise the site and that they’re loosing the big brand bucks to smaller rivals such as Hulu.

On the other hand, Youtube has recently had several significant endorsements including association with Barak Obama’s presidential campaign, the Pope launching a Catholoacism channel and the incredible footage of the (thankfully successful) Hudson river crash that has reminded us of the value of user generated video to capture unexpected exents, not to mention it’s repeated blocking by China and Iran, among others, a clear sign of its international ‘appeal’.

So, it’s arguable that Youtube’s dominant market share and user generated comment makes it irresistible to many seeking a ‘cool’ social media angle to their campaigns.

Moreover, there have been some pessimistic reports from Forester Research, Credit Suisse and the like suggesting that Youtube’s revenue may not cover its escalating costs – as its usage and hence storage and bandwidth requirements continue to rise – for years, however, those reports invariably fail to account for the step changes in performance that occur when improved advertising mechanisms, such as click-to-buy (as in click on the video to go to the sponsors page), are rolled out.

Google has managed to help many webmasters to monetise their own websites, as well as caching in on their own domains and so, with such a vested interest in Youtube’s future, you can be sure that the recent changes to facilitate Youtube advertisers that they are enthusing about including both new ad placements and improved web analytics are just the start.

This has recently changed, however, so now websites with their main pages in a folder can get Sitelinks too.

For example, Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Web Spam, wrote that he deliberately left a holing page on his root domain (www.mattcutts.com/) even though his blog’s homepage was in the “blog” folder (www.mattcutts.com/blog/)

so that he would be able to tell once Google managed to work with websites with their main pages mainly in a subfoler, as with his own.

As you can see from the screen shot above, Google is now showing Sitelinks for his domain for the first time, suggesting that this is also the case for other websites too.

This Sitelink update could well have coincided with their recent introduction of horizontal Sitelinks a few days ago.

Despite Google’s advanced search builder, there are still more powerful features than most people appreciate, for example the following search combines three elements:

seo|sem “offers * tip”

You can try it straight away here.

What that does is search for people who have used either the phrase seo or sem, the pipe “|” meaning “one OR the other”. It also looks for the words “offers and tip” in that order with any old word between them.

Now, here’s a lesser known secret, Twitter’s new search tool uses these advanced search functions too!

Try it for yourself now:

seo|sem “offers * tip”

(On Twitter you can only use single word phrases either side of the pipe.)

Now play with it and create your own power searches!

There has been a lot of discussion about black vs. white hat SEO over the years, but which colour are you?

Take our SEO test to discover your hat colour…

Have you ever?

1. Paid a blogger to write about you? (e.g. using Pay-per-post)
2. Leased links to your websites primarily for their SEO value? (Text-link-ads for example)
3. Scraped other websites for their content either directly or through RSS feeds?
4. Posted spammy, off topic or brazenly self-promoting comments to blogs or forums?
5. Submitted your website to hundreds of web directories or search engines?
6. Submitted near identical content containing backlinks – such as articles or press releases – three or more websites at a time?
7. Created a content-rich landing page and then changed it over to a sales page? (link bait & switch)
8. Sold or leased out links or whole pages from your website without nofollowing them?
9. Joined a link exchange with a view to exchanging links primarily for ranking purposes?
10. Hidden (cloaked) text on your website, or used redirects to deceive the search engines?

Now add up how many questions you said yes to.

Your Score

0-1 You are a search engine angel, or work for them, or have never heard of SEO. We admire your whiter-than-white morals, but fear that your competitors have already outranked you.

2-3 You’re more ethical than most webmasters, but is this because you dismissed the black hat approach as underhand, or wouldn’t know where to start? Either way, we congratulate you (and are in this group ourselves too).

4-6 Are you trying to be black or white hat? It isn’t clear from your answers. This suggests either a carefully conceived strategy [dubbed 'grey hat'] or a ‘try anything’ approach that could do with some direction, before you get into trouble.

7-8 Do you realise how dangerous your dubious tactics are? If not, you are in for a shock. All it takes is a jealous competitor to report you and a ban could soon follow. We suggest cleaning up your act while you still can…

9-10 You’re as black hat as they come and are could also be using scummy techniques that we (almost) dare not mention here (see below). You are at serious risk of being banned by Google but then for a pro like isn’t that just an occupational hazard?

10+ Of course, if you really are a black hat spammer – and not just an everyday webmaster dabbling with the dark side – then all of the above will look pretty tame to you. Equally, however, if automated blogspam (commenting or mass creation), DNS subdomain hijacking and cross site scripting are your sort of thing then you don’t need us to tell you how black hat you really are!

What’s Your Score?

[poll id="1"]

As a result of this seemingly innocuous action some Google Analytics profiles stopped correctly identifying traffic coming from AdWords accounts with differing administrator details, meaning that many Analytics profiles suddenly started to show zero paid search traffic, instead of the regular flow.

For example, see the orange line, representing paid search traffic, that dropped right to zero over the weekend (despite there actually being over 100 visitors sent by Google AdWords).

Google paid search traffic (orange) apparently drops to zero

The AdWords ads continued to run unaffected, it’s just that their traffic is now being reported as organic rather than paid search.

Upon discovering this ‘error’ Monday (16/02/09) afternoon I called Google’s AdWords support line seeking an explanation as to what had gone wrong. The Support Engineer initially had no idea and eventually came back to me with the following explanation.

“We have stopped the auto-tagging of urls from unlinked AdWords and Analytics accounts in order to enhance account holder privacy. We were going to announce the changes, however, that got help up and we didn’t think that many people, unlike yourself, would notice all that quickly anyway – an announcement will soon be made.”

So, there you have it. According to a Google AdWords Support Engineer nobody thought that users might notice that their paid search traffic had suddenly disappeared from their Analytics accounts.

Of course, this won’t affect everyone. But, what about you?

So, I’ve now removed the nofollow tags from the external links on my site, including blog comments, as hyperlinks are an integral part of the web. As I have a WordPress blog I used the NoFollow Free WordPress plugin, as it has some handy features and saved me the time I’d otherwise have spent hacking my installation.

Of course, I may have to reconsider this policy if inundated with spam, and will be more selective than even about which comments to allow, but rather than be cynical, I thought that I’d give it a go.

I also recently read a great article on dofollowing blogs and how (and why) to write worthwhile comments.

Dofollow blog commenting netiquette vs a barbecue party

Cheers SEO 2.0!

How can i get better page rank of my website. How should I put links in my website to get better page rank. Kindly suggest?

PageRank is determined by the quantity and quality of the links to your website. As a vaguely general rule each Rank is at least 10x harder to reach (and also 10 more valuable) than the one below.

For example, it generally takes at least 10 PR 3 links to equate to the value of one PR 4, sometimes more. Further, each of those PR 3s is on average worth at least 10 PR 2 links.

Please note that PageRank isn’t the same as the actual search engine rankings. Even a PageRank 10 site such as http://www.adobe.com/ will only rank well for relevant (in Google’s eye’s) phrases.

As such, a high PR alone is no guarantee of a ranking well for any given keyword, the site also has to be optimised for it, and ideally the link’s to it should have relevant keyword in their anchor text.

As a general rule, a pages PageRank is equal to or a level below its top tier of links.

So, for example, a site with say:

5 x PR5 links
22 x PR 4 links
44 x PR 3 links
100 x PR 2 links
350 x PR 1 links
950 x PR 0 links
1000 x unranked links

Would probably be a PR 4 site, bordering on PR 5. Adding a few PR 6 links, plus a few more PR 5s would probably bring the site up to a PR of 5.

On the other hand, it would probably take over a dozen PR 5 links to bring the page up to PR with any from PR 6 pages, but even hundreds of links PR 4 links, or thousands of links from PR 0-3 sites might make no difference.

This is because as per my earlier rule of thumb, all other things being equal, each PR 6 link is worth approximately as much as around 100 PR 4s.

Occasionally, however, there’s a problem. As happened to me, yesterday.

On this occasion I’d emailed the code for a new style Analytics tag to our client’s developers who had installed the code in the website footer, as instructed.

A few days later however their reports still contained no analytics data, despite the Google Analytics’ tag status checker reporting that everything was fine!

Unsure of the exact problem, I tried out EpikOne’s free Google Analytics tag checker for the first time, which a few hours later confirmed that the tags we’re not working after all.

Finally, I decided to replace client’s GA tag code with a fresh copy, and lo and behold, when I reran the EpikOne tester, it reported that the tags are now working fine. (Which was quicker feedback, than waiting for the first data to appear in Google Analytics.) Moreover, it also told me that one page still wasn’t registering properly, presumably because it doesn’t use the same footer template as the rest of the site.

I’m not always so impressed by the usefulness of free SEO [and analytics] tools, but on this occasion I have to hand it to EpikOne.

This expensive mistake could have been avoided by first testing their target phrases in Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Read their full story here: How to waste money on SEO

Some, for example, will advise that a link from a PR 5 website should get your site indexed in under a week, and a link from a PR6 website will do the trick in around a day, but that doesn’t help you if you don’t already have access to a PR 6 website; which you probably don’t if you’re reading this article.

What follows is a list of the steps that I have used to get new, unknown domains indexed by Google in under 7 days, without resorting to placing links on established websites already under my control.

First, however, for your safety, I should highlight what not to do.

1. Suggest your site to Google using their add your url tool.Well, you can if you want to, it’s harmless, but this approach usually takes weeks, and besides probably won’t work if your site doesn’t already have links from other websites.
2. Using the sitemap submit tool in webmaster tools.OK, so step 1 is harmless and submitting sitemaps is really a good thing, but it still isn’t likely to help you get index in under seven days, so let’s move on…
3. Buy one of those “website promotion” tools that promises to submit your site to thousands of search engines for a small fee.This is, at best, a waste of time. Google has around a 66% of the UK and US search market share and Yahoo!, MSN and Ask mop up the remaining 33% or so, leaving less that 1% for all of the other search engines combined.Further, if you have to give out your email address to register for the “service” there is every chance that you’ll be spammed to high heaven, and probably be charged for the privilege too.Worse, some of them charge a monthly fee offering to resubmit your site in return. This is to be avoided at all costs, as it is a form of search engine spamming and risks getting your site banned altogether.
4. Buy a “Get listed in Google in under 72 hours Guaranteed” package from a far-flung company that randomly sent you a spam email. You may be amused to hear that Google get these too!

You see, SEO isn’t a dark-art any more. Some “experts” may read this and pull their hair out because I’m giving away their “trade secrets”, but they way I see it any SEO company, consultant or marketing agency worth their salt should be able to tell you how they get results.

Besides, you can’t afford to risk having your site banned by Google, due to dodgy “black hat” practices, and how do you know that they’re not if they won’t even tell you?

How to Get in to Google in Under 3 Days

The trick to getting into Google in under three days, does indeed involve linking to your website from high PageRank (PR) websites.

In addition to a high PageRank, there are two criteria that such websites need to meet in order to be of interest to you.

Firstly, they must allow for user generated content i.e. they must allow you to create a blog, personal profile upload an article, submit a press release or tag a favourite site fast, and for free.

Secondly, they must have a high update speed i.e. they have a main page that changes frequently – at least daily – that you can somehow get access to. Thankfully most of the sites meeting the first condition automatically meet this one as well.

Getting in to Google – What to do

1. Write a couple of short summaries “elevator pitches” of your site’s main features and benefits and it’s target audience of different lengths – 100 and 300 words – or longer if you actually have something to say.
2. Go to a selection of the following websites and create a post, profile, ad, article or whatever and use your nicely polished, pitch as the body copy.

Ensure that your post of tagged and filed appropriately and be sure to include a link to your website using your full url. For example, my SEO Consultancy CV

You may need to vary the tone to suit each site, as a community forum will prefer chatty styles to stuffy press releases, so choose your language accordingly. If in doubt, emulate the style of currently popular posts to prevent yours from being deleting as spam.

“But where do I post it?”, I hear you ask.

To find suitable places all you have to do is Google a few of the leading “free business classified” sites.

These sites have sections specifically designed for advertising your business online, which makes this approach preferable to forum and blog spamming and other parasitic activities.

There are of course other types of suitable sites, many classier than the free classifieds, but I’m not ready to give them all away quite yet. For more upmarket alternatives, you can always try asking me.

If this turns out to be a hit topic, I may revisit it later.

Getting listed in Google in under three days

Now, there are in fact a handful of sites out there so rapidly spidered that they can have new pages indexed in under an hour!

Better still, done the right way, links from them can get your site into Google in less than 72 hours.

Incidentally, if you’re facing a big launch, and are in a hurry and desperately need your site indexed in under three days, I can probably help.

A word of caution

Please note that I am NOT suggesting that you ever set out to spam the aforementioned sites. That is not what this is about and nor will that do you any favours with Google. My aim is for genuine websites with uniquely valuable content to gain some initial exposure and backlinks through professionally written press releases posted to sites open to this kind of promotion.

As such, there can be a massive difference between “budget” agencies that can damage your brand with spam tactics and badly written copy and the same work carried out by a reputable SEO agency. Also, remember that it can be nearly impossible to undo mistakes on the web, so if in doubt hire a professional that will take the time to understand your audience and target your marketing accordingly.